Listen to Your Body

Part 1:

I mentioned before that the dietician/counselor I see is confident that my body will tell me what to eat during pregnancy.

On Saturday, as we were walking from the restaurant where I had eaten too much Pad Thai to the hall for the afternoon portion of our dance weekend, I saw a guy carrying a Coke and had an urge to get one for myself. Was this my body talking, or just decades of advertising conditioning me to drink Coke when primed by the side of that red and white bottle. (Turned out he was carrying a Dr. Pepper, which I often prefer to Coke, but not that day.) I have been avoiding caffeine, which isn’t that hard, since I normally avoid caffeine–except when I can’t resist the Coke/Dr. Pepper urge. Since the caffeine addicts medical professionals have modified the official pregnancy guideline to no more than a cup of coffee a day, I’m not excessively worried about one caffeinated drink every couple of weeks.

Anyway, a couple of few blocks worth of belches later, it was clear that my body wanted to be burped. A lot. Why it needed carbonation and high fructose corn syrup plus caffeine, I don’t know.

P.S. Please do not disturb my comfortable denial over the amount of caffeine in chocolate. Even when I was suffering from horrible insomnia, the origin of my caffeine-avoidance tendencies, I did not give up on the food of the gods. (Still, I can’t help remembering the drive-by commentator at Chez Miscarriage insisting that it was evil to drink hot chocolate while pregnant.)

Part 2:

The dancing I do is mostly one of two types: an American form of folk dancing and dancing from one of the Celtic Nations. So far, I have been able to keep it up (not in the couple of weeks after retrieval-too bouncy for my ovaries), but my stamina is much worse than before.

The dancing is an important part of my life. In the throes of my exercise-resistant periods, it was the only physical activity I got and in the worst months of busy work schedules, it is often our main opportunity to socialize. I met Mr. Luo though one of these dances, and he introduced me to the other one.

Fair and Balanced

Having had my fun with the inappropriate doctors, I should give credit to the good ones.

1. My former gynecologist in Spring Town figured out I probably had fibroids just by asking the right questions (or putting the right questions on her questionnaire) at my first appointment. I had just been getting my annual exams from my primary care physician after I moved to Spring Town, and had only gone to an ob-gyn because the pcp couldn’t fit a diaphragm. I’d never complained much about my heavy periods, because I thought it was just the endometriosis. Former gyn also sent me off to get my moles checked by a dermatologist, which turned out to be a good thing to do.

Inappropriate Comments by Health Care Providers

I understand that a doctor can’t always tell what will offend a patient. A woman I knew in graduate school once complained to me because a doctor at the health center had called her “kiddo”. I was pretty sure that she was talking about my favorite doctor who had been my primary care dr. for most of my grad school years. We’d been through ups and downs, but a “kiddo” now and then had never bugged me at all. I can understand why my friend was offended, however.
When I moved to the Republic of X, it annoyed me that the default title was Mrs. I wasn’t married, and it seemed to me that an advantage of Ms. was that it is appropriate for either a married or unmarried woman, and hence appropriate when you don’t know which you are dealing with. Apparently there were more women around here who would be offended by Ms. than the reverse. Anyway, I was particularly annoyed by doctors who did this because in theory they had the new-patient questionnaires I had filled out that included marital status. Give me a Ms. or even a Miss please. On the other hand, it doesn’t bother me a bit if a doctor calls me by my first name even as I call him or her by Dr. Lastname. (DoctorMama had a post on the naming issue with many, many comments.)
Also, I think some doctors forget that I may be less amenable to friendly chatting when one of us completely clothed and one of us in a flimsy exam gown.

The following cases, I believe, are not borderline, but completely inappropriate.

First, the mandatory insensitive comment on an in vitro cycle:

Urgent care doctor treating Mr. Luo who was extremely ill on the day of retrieval for ivf1: You’re doing ivf? I heard about a clinic here that mixed up the embryos and implanted them in the wrong women.

Then a few that are just conversations I don’t want to have with my health care providers:

The breast surgeon who did my biopsy a few years ago (benign, thank you for asking): Mid-life crisis blah blah blah. So, do you know where the fun younger people hang out here in Spring Town?

Yes, this was during an appointment, which means this statement was stated just before or after examining my breasts (but not, to my recollection, during the exam). Did I mention he was married to my primary care physician?

Acupuncturist in Mexico: Told me a mildly dirty joke, involving a pun on “chile”/”chilly” because “chile” (like many, many words in Mexico) has a sexual connotation. Punchline: Nixon, next to the President of Mexico at a urinal says, “It’s a little chilly”.

Optometrist: Mid-life crisis blah blah blah. Divorced from my wife. On the rebound. Looking for someone new. (I don’t remember the details about this one, just that I didn’t want to hear it, and that a friend who had also been to this guy had a similar complaint.)

You know, I didn’t get these comments when I was in my twenties and thin and pretty. Was a thirty-something fat chick somehow safe to talk to about the mid-life crisis? I don’t think it was that they thought I was desperate enough to respond, because none seemed like a come-on to me in particular. I just thought the conversations were inappropriate and was not assertive enough to say so.

When I was twenty-something and thinner and so on, I didn’t get the innappropriate comments, just the doctor of traditional Chinese medicine in Old Colony who molested me. But I don’t want to talk about that. I wasn’t assertive enough then either.

COMING UP: to balance the scales, a post on my best doctors.

Wages

At the gym, I saw a story on CNN about a minimum wage proposal on the ballot in Missouri. The  living wage advocates want to raise the minimum wage an amount approximately equal to the hourly wage I got as a student manager at my work-study job in college.

My alumni magazine had an article about the class of ’06’s jobs after graduation. About 2/3 of the class had found full-time employment by the time they graduated. Of those, the median income was … approximately equal to my current salary, 18 years after graduating. (I don’t know if graduate TAships were included, since students going to graduate or professional school were listed separately.)

When I was still a student, my boyfriend and I once discussed post-graduation salaries. I wasn’t particularly savvy, but I named an amount that I thought was reasonable. He thought I was crazy (he was a computer science major). The amount I named was approximately the salary I ended up earning in my first year as an Assistant Professor at my university, 11 years after graduating. I don’t even remember what my salary was in Old Colony, where I went to work after I graduated, except that it was on the low end of the pay scale for Old Colony University, but plenty enough for a single woman to live on comfortably (and travel and save a bit) there.

If I had wanted to make a lot more money, I could have made other decisions about what to do with my life, but I didn’t.   The three years I spent in Old Colony were some of the best years of my life, and I am still amazed sometimes at how much money I make now,  so I’m not really complaining. Just noticing the coincidences.

Conversations about Religion

I wrote this off line before I came home last month and forgot about it until I read Bitch Ph.D.’s recent post that mentioned talking to her father about religion and her kid.

1.

Luolin’s language tutor, in Old Colony: Are you Christian?

Luolin: I’m an atheist, but my mother is Buddhist.

Tutor: No way! Only old people are Buddhists. Young people are Christians.

The topic probably came up because he was a language tutor for the local Baptist missionaries (his mother was a nurse for my doctor at the Baptist clinic) and the text we were using included lessons on proselytizing.

 

2.

When my mother was visiting me in Old Colony.

Luolin: When you go to temples here, the people worshipping are all old ladies and their grandkids.

Mother: It’s the same back home. Remember how your grandmother used to take you to mass?

I do realize that this was not necessarily an accurate description of religious demographics in the United States, although it was true for our immediate family.

3.

On the slow boat to China

Pakistani guy sharing our cabin: Are you Christian?

Luolin: I’m an atheist.

Pakistani guy: (Shocked) What about your parents?

Luolin: Well, my parents were raised Catholic, but now my father is an atheist and my mother is a Buddhist.

Pakistani guy: Oh, I see, you are following your father.

He seemed much comforted by the thought.

Nutrition

Part 1.

My dietician has repeatedly reassured me that my body will tell me what to eat while I am pregnant.

For the most part, I have not noticed major differences from what I normally want to eat, for better (salad every day) or worse (cookies every day). I have been trying to eat more fruits and vegetables, but that had more to do with signals from my brain than signals from my body. (I was a vegetarian until three 1/2 years ago, so I was more accustomed to monitoring my protein than my fruits and veggies.)

Part 2.
Still, I suppose it might mean something that when I was browsing a cookbook looking for something I was interested in cooking last week, I chose a soup that contained: barley, rice, kidney beans, garbonzos, spinach, 2 bunches parsley, and one bunch cilantro. Of course, by the time I finished cooking it, I wasn’t hungry. (The book is Slow and Difficult Soups  by David Ansell; this one was not difficult, but it was slow.)

Part 3.

I stopped at McDonalds for fries on my way home the other day. “Maybe I’ll blog about having the disclipline/awareness of my own hunger level to buy the small fries instead of the medium, even though the medium fries only cost one cent more,” I thought. Then I bought the medium fries.

Feline Approval Rating

The Goddess Cat approves of all the naps, because she likes to lie down on my chest or stomach for her own nap.

The Princess Cat does not like the competition for space on the couch.

Meanwhile, the neighbor’s Dynamo Cat has broken through two of our window screens in her cross-window fights with our  cats and gotten into the house three times. The first time, she chased the Princess upstairs before I realized what was going on. The second time, I heard a noise and found her in a stare-off with one of our cats. This morning, she ignored them and came upstairs looking for human attention. (Screen #1 has been repaired; we hadn’t realized screen #2 was that open until she got in today.)

One More Thing

If the cold front that is forecast for Thursday does not arrive, I will be very sad. 90-degree weather  in October is wearing me down.

Still Here

Still tired.

Every time I start think the fatigue is going away, I end up taking naps all day.

I know it’s bad when I don’t even have the energy to read all my blogs for two days.

Today’s accomplishment: doing laundry, which is so much easier now that we have a washer and dryer at home that it doesn’t seem like it should count for much.

In Sum

IVF1:

34 subcuteaneous injections (Lupron, Follistim, Repronex)

15 intramuscular injections (HCG, PIO)
14 blood draws

2 IV lines (hysteroscopy and retrieval)

=65 needles in my skin

IVF2:

 30 subcutaneous (Lupron, Follistim)
14 intramuscular  (HCG, PIO)
13 blood draws

1 IV line

=58 needle pricks

IVF3:

25 subcutaneous (Lupron, Follistim)

37 intramuscular (HCG, PIO)

11 blood draws

1 IV line

=74 needle pricks

But who’s counting?